Water shortage is becoming a concern in many parts of the world including United States which uses the greatest amount of residential water in the world. In growing times of water shortages, the problem of having sufficient water supplies will most likely continue to get worse. A toilet uses the largest amount of water in the United States, representing more than ⅓ of the total household water used. According to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), billions of gallons of water can be saved annually if toilet water usage in the United States can be reduced by ⅓. In fact, more than 640 billion gallons of water can be saved annually if the older model toilets in the United States can be replaced with the newer water efficient toilets.
Low flow toilets use 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf), which is compared to a conventional toilet which uses 3.5 to 7 gpf. Low flow toilets are simply designed to help reduce toilet water usage. Unfortunately, research shows that many of these low flow toilets actually waste more water than they are designed for. The key issue is that they do not release adequate amount of water to clear the waste. Consumers often have to flush two or three times more to clear the wastes.
To increase performance some of the newer low flow toilets use air pressure to help clear wastes. These “High Efficiency Toilets” (HET) clear wastes effectively, but the air pressure has a tendency to splash waste water causing droplets to become airborne. Another issue related to the HET toilets is a significant increase in noise during flushing. In addition, these toilets treat liquid waste the same as the solid waste. These problems tend to make these more expensive devices not practical for the average household.
Dual flush toilets have gained in popularity in recent years. These toilets treat liquid and solid wastes differently as they should. They provide two types of flushes, short flush (less water) for liquid waste and standard flushes for solid waste. While dual flush toilets are more effective than the low flow toilet in saving water, they tend to be more expensive requiring several years of payback period for consumers. Dual flush toilets are also designed with different mechanisms from the conventional toilets, therefore they are also more expensive for manufacturers to make due to replacement of the existing manufacturing equipment, purchase, and installation of new equipment. Prematurely replacing existing conventional toilets with dual flush toilets also creates environmental issues due to early disposal of the existing toilets to the landfill.
Dual flush toilet retrofit kits which convert existing conventional toilets into dual flush toilets can be a good alternative because they tend to be significantly cheaper than buying a new dual flush toilet and they do not require replacing the existing toilet. However, almost all retrofit kits currently on the market require replacing certain parts of the existing toilet and often need a professional plumber to complete the installation, which adds significant cost to consumers.
In these respects, one or more embodiments of the present invention substantially depart from the conventional concepts and designs of the prior art, and in so doing provide an apparatus/system primarily developed for the purpose of controlling the water volume utilized to flush an existing toilet or new toilet. The apparatus/system accomplishes the task efficiently and cost effectively, and accomplishes the task without replacing any existing parts, and is a portable device.